About HEAL London

HEAL London is a non-profit voluntary organisation whose primary purpose is to provide support and education to people diagnosed HIV+ or with illnesses that have been classified as AIDS. It is run by people whose lives have been affected by HIV+ in one way or another. We are affiliated with other HEAL groups (Health Education and AIDS Liaison) round the world as well as having close connections with a number of other groups and individuals who call for a rethink in the way AIDS is approached by most medical authoritiies at present.

How are we different from other AIDS organisations?

What makes us different is taking a more questioning and critical approach to dealing with the whole subject, which is - dare we say - less hysterical, more analytical and, in our opinion, much closer to the truth and reality than the vast majority of HIV/AIDS organisations.

There is also a fair amount of evidence that our perspectives on AIDS are much more effective at prolonging people's lives than the model of AIDS perpetuated by most medical authorities. They will help people not only help people have a future to look forward to, but help people enjoy that future considerably more than simply taking the life-shortening and often debilitatingly-toxic AIDS drugs that are the primary solution offered by most medical authorities.

We believe the perspectives and sources we consider far more credible than most medical authorities are much more empowering for people diagnosed HIV+ than the approach taken by the vast majority of other AIDS organisations.

What's our agenda?

Ultimately, to save lives and quality of lives, which is probably very similar to most other HIV / AIDS organisations.

However, we believe it is dangerous and misleading to sublimate your critical faculties to unquestioning faith in the medical profession and other well-meaning but often misguided or misled do-gooders. It's clear that some of the most prominent campaigners on AIDS either get paid handsomely for it (Bill Clinton, for example), or else do not appear to have ever spent any time closely examining alternative explanations of what is going on. One of the few prominent politicians who has examined the issue in detail is former South African president Thabo Mbeki, who has read extensively on this issue.

We believe it is safer to ask awkward questions, seek alternative opinions and take personal responsibility for weighing up the facts and making your own decisions. We'll help you with information that other HIV and AIDS support organisations won't share with you.

What's the HEAL London perspective on HIV/AIDS then?

The table below shows some of the differences between our stance and that of the AIDS orthodoxy, and members will agree with some, most or all of it. Please note that these are very summarised positions - there is considerablely more detail that can accompany these points.

The orthodox AIDS model

HEAL London

HIV has been proven to exist many times.

No such retrovirus that could credibly be called 'HIV' ever been proven to exist properly at all, in the way that most people would understand the phrase 'proven to exist'. What is mistakenly taken to be proof of a retrovirus is always laboratory phenomena already known to be non-specific.

There has never been a single case of a any retrovirus that could plausibly be called 'HIV' found directly in a single person, ever – that means 'HIV' has never actually been isolated directly from any body fluid, such as blood, semen, saliva, breast milk, or urine. Instead, to find 'HIV' they take cells from the body and biochchemically torture them until they produce particles.

Everyone can produce retroviral particles that would be presumed to be 'HIV' particles if their cells were put through the same torturous processes that are used to produce ‘HIV’ – it’s a natural characteristic of cells that are being stressed. That's why there is a lack of adequate scientific controls in the experiments that claim to have 'proven' HIV exists.

Mainly for the reason above, expressed particles classified as HIV by retrovirologists have never been shown to kill CD4 cells and in fact there is no widely accepted model as to how these particles could actually cause CD4 cell depletion. All the theories proposed so far are not really compatible with empirical evidence. In fact, there is no credible evidence that any retroviral-type particle has ever been shown to cause any human disease, let alone death.

By contrast, increasing evidence suggests that particles produced under stress that were presumed to be infectious retroviruses are part of the body's attempts to cope with difficult environmental circumstances, by repairing genetic damage or changing the DNA to handle challenging circumstances more effectively.Thus, these particles expressed when cells are genuinely under stress are not the cause of the problem - they are actually part of the body's attempt at a solution.

There is no evidence that withstands scrutiny that any retrovirus has ever been transferred successfully from one person to another by any means. The notion that an alleged immune system-ravaging retrovirus has been proved to be sexually transmitted is utter guesswork without scientific substance. It is simply not supported by scientific evidence at either a microbiological level or an epidemiological level, or anywhere in between.

With our present knowledge it appears that the notion that any retroviral particles are exogenous (ie, originating from outside the body) was merely an original assumption that has never been confirmed. Multiple studies have shown that the notion of a specific sexually-transmitted virus causing HIV+ diagnoses or AIDS is simply not a credible explanation for the empirically observed phenomena.

In controlled studies, even when there is 'unsafe' penetrative sex (ie, without condoms) between people diagnosed HIV+ and people who are not, it does not correlate in an increase in HIV+ diagnoses, and that other behavioural differences such as number of partners ke a noticeable difference to HIV+ diagnosis rates, even though differences in rates of other sexually transmitted infections are noticed.

This further undermines the notion that what causes HIV+ diagnoses has any inherent relationship with sex. There are other reasons for ill-health and HIV+ diagnoses that are more co-incident with sex in some circumstances that misleadingly give the impression that sex itself is the relevant factor.

HIV can be transmitted from mother to child during pregnancy, childbirth or through suckling.

There is no evidence that , if it were to be shown to exist, an alleged infectious retrovirus has been transferred from mother to child. However, we do know that non-specific antibodies that children are born with may temporarily show up as positive on HIV tests, most of which go away again within two years. This means that babies may be diagnosed HIV+ when born but many become negative again within a couple of years.

Being diagnosed HIV+ my be partly caused simply by the process of being created in the womb and taking on board mother's antibodies, either in the womb or in breastmilk, especially because we already know that many mothers may be diagnosed HIV+ while they are pregnant and some while after the pregnancy has ended they may be diagnosed HIV negative again. Studies have shown that babies prevented from breastfeeding because their mothers have been diagnosed HIV+ do considerably worse than mothers who continue breastfeeding.

Again, no evidence that withstands scrutiny that this alleged virus has been transferred to anyone by any means including contaminated needles or blood products. However, we do know that for different reasons, different groups such as haemophiliacs and drug users can show up positive on HIV tests for reasons that have nothing to do with an infectious retrovirus.

HIV tests are a very reliable way of determining HIV infection.

No type of HIV test, or combination of tests, has ever been standardised by using an actual human retrovirus, and to claim that they are reliable is scientifically incorrect and essentially fraudulent. Instead of a 'chain of proof' that would normally be used to link a diagnosis with the thing the test is supposed to be diagnosing, such as with pregnancy tests, HIV+ diagnoses are produced from a chain of assumptions and presumptions. This is because no-one has produced robust evidence that they thing they are supposed to be measuring actually exists.

All the proteins used in HIV antibody tests have been shown to be produced by the body from inherent processes, and there are over 60 physiological conditions (including many real medical conditions) that can produce false positives - but some of these conditions are also relatively benign such as vaccinations and pregnancy.

Everybody has antibodies that can trigger positive responses on HIV tests, it’s just a question of whether or not you have enough to hit some arbitrary number so as to be labelled ‘HIV+’, or not. There is no robust evidence that show that HIV tests are inherently a reliable predictor of death or ill-health either and have even correlated with some health-protective effect in some circumstances. In some environments they have been shown to be completely irrelevant to health outcomes.

But some of the conditions that can trigger false positives on HIV tests are themselves unhealthy so there will inevitably be some correlation between HIV+ diagnoses and ill-health. However,believing that an HIV+ diagnosis means infection with a deadly illness does tend to become a self-fulfilling prophesy of ill-health and death. The medical profession continually portrays this diagnosis as implicitly a predictor of inevitable immune system decline and death, but when you know more about this you realise this is not so at all. The intense fear, stress and depression associated with an HIV+ diagnosis and believing you are going to die much sooner itself has a profoundly detrimental effect on many people's health by itself.

Therefore, when you carefully select which group of people to look at, there does at first superficially appear to be a causal relationship between HIV+ diagnoses and ill-health. But this is nothing like 'proof of an immune-system-destroying retrovirus'. What is more dangerous about this is that it misleads people into taking inappropriate steps to look after their health - ignoring any real causes of ill-health if any are present, and taking ultimately-deadly chemotherapy to save them from a non-existent virus.

There is no cure for HIV infection or AIDS.

There are plenty of people who were diagnosed HIV+ at one point and subsequently reverted to negative. And there are people who have been diagnosed with AIDS who are now well because they took a more holistic approach to looking after their well-being, avoided taking AIDS drugs, and did not believe they had a death sentence.

CD4 counts and viral load tests are valuable tools for measuring the strength of the immune system versus HIV and for monitoring the progress of treatment.

CD4 counts are medically acknowledged to be useless at predicting long-term well-being because they do not reflect a person's true health. Many healthy people have low CD4 counts, such as athletes often do. Viral load tests have also shown to correlate very poorly with health outcomes, and despite many doctors believing them useful in 'monitoring AIDS treatment', no viral load test can even identify the existence of so-called 'HIV'.

Additionally, viral load tests and CD4 counts have been shown to have virtually no correlation with each other, indicating that they are essentially unrelated. This fundamentally undermines the notion that viral load tests are measuring anything meaningful to one's health.

Anti-retroviral drugs have proved to be valuable life-saving medications that have improved considerably over time, making AIDS a chronic but manageable illness.

All AIDS drugs have potentially serious and life-threatening side-effects including death for some people. Liver failure is the leading cause of death of people taking AIDS drugs, and it has been acknowledged that the AIDS drugs are doing this. At least one study has shown that AIDS drugs are as effective at prolonging life as poverty and squalor, malnutrition, and polluted and infected water - ie, not at all.

By contrast, the people who live longest and who are most likely to live normal healthy lives after their HIV+ diagnosis are those discount it's claimed significance and who look after their physical and mental health in a holistic manner, as numerous examples round the world demonstrate.